


So Sang the Sun in Flight

by Seo81



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Supernatural
Genre: Gen, I Don't Even Know, I'm Sorry, Mentor/Protégé, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-06-01 17:40:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6529723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seo81/pseuds/Seo81
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Harry, growing wings is just another freakish occurrence that he has to hide from his relatives. But when taking flight means running from volatile groups of wizards, angels, demons, and two brothers, he finds solace in being able to confide to Gabriel, the strange entity living inside his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. So Sang the fledgling

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know what I'm doing  
> First of all, I'm still only on season 1 of Supernatural, so I only know what happens to Gabriel through spoilers  
> Second of all, I'm not sure whether I'm actually even going to continue this fic  
> Third of all, unless I get more than 5 reviews, I'm probably not going to continue this  
> Fourth of all, updates will be slow because I need to catch up on the series  
> As an extra point, I really, REALLY need a BETA.  
> Enjoy.

“Lucifer, you are my brother, and I love you, but you a great big bag of dicks.”  
Harry jerks awake, breathing shallow and rapid, pupils dilating and the distinct knowledge that something had changed. He remembers flashes of pain-a deep scar stretching from his left hip to his right shoulder blade- something stabbing through his heart, and darkness. He feels the jerk of something unlocking before the burning starts.  
.  
.  
.  
His troubles start when he is ten, when small bumps sprout just above his shoulder blades.   
Dudley's hand-me-down clothing is always itchy and catches on his skinny frame, so Harry doesn’t notice the long scratches across his back until his bathroom day. He sighs in relief as the irritating fabric pulls away from his skin-and gapes.  
Between long rows of inflamed scratches and a patchwork pattern of bruises, two tiny red bumps show plainly in the bathroom mirror, pulsing with thin purple veins streaking across the surface. They twitch as if in accordance with his shock.  
Turning abruptly away from the mirror, Harry draws a shaky breath and turns on the water (cold, as always) he had been allowed, willing himself to believe the strange growths are a figment of his imagination. One of the rare times the Dursleys watched something other than game-shows on color tv, the medical show had been talking about cancerous growths. It explained that overweight people were more likely to contract medical symptoms, and how some people developed skin cancer. At the time, Petunia had been flippant, complaining how the doctors loved to make up new non existent medical conditions,   
The bumps numb in the cold water, and he struggles to stop the water, no matter how cold it is. A banging sound shakes him from his thoughts, and the appearance of the two strange forms are quickly forgotten in favour of washing away the dried, scabbed blood from his knees.   
Nobody could know about the growths. Least of all the Dursleys, lest they try and “normalize” him.  
.  
The next few weeks were filled with scratching.  
The irritated skin around the two nubbins burning even more fiercely than the slow growth of bone and sinew. It nearly drove Harry mad. Aunt Petunia had started wondering about the specks of blood on the back of her (though she loathed to admit) nephew’s shirts   
Two tiny solid lumps of bone, flesh and tendons shown tauntingly from his back the next Thursday. They were lightly feathered, clumps of grey down fluffed to a ridiculous degree, making Dudley's old sweater puff out like a fine pillow. They looked somewhat like the roasted chicken wings he was made to prepare every Wednesday, little bits of fluff clinging to flesh pink skin. The pockmarked skin beginning to fill out with tiny primary and secondary feathers.   
Now, it was almost painful to sleep on his back as the soft joints screamed in pain when pressed down on the thin mattress of his closet. When the things sticking out of his back kept on growing, he stole the bandages that aunt Petunia kept for “patching up her dear Dudley-Dums” and bound the stubby limbs.   
They were growing too big. Too big, yet he couldn’t bear to cut them off. They were beautiful. They were his. Not a cast-off of Dudley’s or something picked up from charity, but his.   
Soft russet brown feathers ruffled as if agreeing with his thoughts, flexing slightly and twitching near the wing tips.   
“BOY! Get down here!”  
The wings flinched as Harry startled, and he rushed to bind them.   
.  
The primary education school nurse is checking weight today in the infirmary. Harry had never been as tense as he was right now. What if they discovered the wings? Would the extra weight clue them in?   
The day of the exam, he’s trembling violently in Dudley's hand-me-downs. The nurse asks him to take off his shirt to use a stethoscope and after he continually insists on keeping his shirt on, the nurse becomes frustrated. The commencing tug-of-war between the nurse and himself causes all sorts of materials around them. The posters of body anatomy begin to tear while cracks appear with the noise of breaking glass sounds without anything touching the bandage and lollipop jars.   
It’s a lengthy struggle, and one that causes attention from outside of the nurse's’ office. Just as the nurse manages to tug off his shirt, the lock on the office door jiggles loose, and worried school teachers rush in.  
The sight of wings the size of a small buzzard on the back of their student serves to stun them. With a shriek of terror, Harry wills his teacher and nurse not to remember the event.  
The two adult figures abruptly drop to the ground like puppets released from strings, faces pressed against broken glass and pieces of plastic-covered paper.   
Harry riffles through the rest of the students medical files and finds his cousin’s papers. He writes Dudley’s heart rate per minute and blood pressure, hoping that the school officials won’t notice. He then flees the scene, returning to his classroom peaky, but in the strange knowledge that his secret is safe.  
When the nurse awakes, she finds the mess in her office, and assumes the unconscious teacher had wrecked havoc on the office while drunk before being knocked incoherent by the jar of needle points shattered on the floor. The teacher is abruptly fired while the nurse can only wonder how Harry, the smallest child in the class managed to have blood pressure high enough to have a early heart-attack on his person.   
The new teacher is at least sixty years old, arthritic joints and severe cataracts that render him nearly blind. He is old, but ludicrously religious; reciting christian prayers during class instead of teaching maths, condemning students of different races to turn to christianity.  
He never notices the small green-eyed boy with two massive bumps on his back.  
.  
Three more weeks passed in this manner, and Harry began to see the results of waiting.  
Golden brown plumage with yellow secondary feathers aired plainly in the pale light of the bathroom window. He tests them, beating the limbs and feeling brisk air flow between the under feathers.  
It’s magical.   
Harry beats them harder, wings falling into a constant rhythm he’d oft seen the tiny starlings outside the window do. What little dust buffets into the corners of the bathroom, crashing sounds as towels and soaps and bottles of shampoo knock askew. Harder and harder, maneuvering the wings into a slightly curled position, leaning forward and feeling the joints creak with sudden pressure before realizing that he’s hovering!  
With what limited space there is in the bathroom, he manages to fly shakily toward the window, wanting to see the sky and follow the undefinable urge to shed some sort of barrier. He’s partway through forcing the window open when he realizes that he’s bleeding sluggishly from a piece of glass from the shower door is sticking through his foot.  
...And that Petunia is at the bathroom doorway, face white as death and grip loosening on the broom in her hands.  
The magical feeling abruptly stops as he stops the beating of his wings and crashes to the linoleum floor, unmindful of the glass shards scattered on the floor. A moment of stunned silence rings throughout the room.  
He’d been caught.  
He’d been caught-What if Vernon caught word of this? He couldn’t-couldn’t lose his wings- not right now. Not right after the freedom of the air, the casualness of flight a wonder to him after being grounded.  
Petunia started screaming and the silence broke abruptly.  
The pounding of heavy steps and lighter ones followed the choked off scream and resounding boom from the bathroom.  
Harry doesn’t know what he does, but the deep feeling of loathing lashes out in a flash of blinding light.  
There’s the instinct to grab Petunia by the face and he does so, through her shrieks of agony. He vaguely notices the drywall and metal of the sink and closet almost disintegrating from the light and his male relatives being flung in a blast radiating from his person while Petunia’s eyes and mouth stream with light.   
The moment passes as soon as it began. Petunia drops, slumped to the ground with her eyes glazed and wide open. Harry looks on in apathy as Vernon roars in rage over the body of his spouse. He has half a mind to smite the obese man as well for the healing belt marks on his back, but chooses to take flight instead. Golden wings spread wide in flight, he nearly cries at the sheer joy running through his veins.  
He’s free.  
Vernon and Dudley Dursley would swear that they saw an angel take Petunia to heaven.  
Particularly knowledgeable christians would say they saw an avenging angel smite a woman’s soul into non-existence.  
Nurses at the hospice would whisper about the unresponsive husk of a woman's body.  
Harry doesn’t know why, but he thinks that a brown haired smiling man named Gabriel would say that his aunt got “just desserts”.


	2. So Sang the Blackpoll Warbler

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Harry is nowhere near any sort of landmass, Dumbledore is an arse, Snape is turning towards dark thoughts, and Gabriel is just brooding.  
> Enjoy.

Harry’s hungry. He’s cold, he’s pretty sure that for the first few hours, a steady stream of blood is dripping from his foot, and he feels dizzy. His wings are beginning to cramp from being held in the same position in flight, and he’s pretty sure that he’s somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. He guesses that he can hold stable flight for at most another hour before falling into the middle of the ocean and drowning. It’s a bleak thought, but one that keeps his wings flapping a slight bit faster.  
All he can see is sky and sea, the clouds left behind him in rainy Surrey in Britain. There are few signs of life- the occasional splash too big to be an ocean wave, a distant group of migratory birds, and a muted ship horn from far in the distance. It’s the same scenery over the course of the last ten hours of flight. His neck is slightly burning, but the warmth of the sun is nice when the headwinds are freezing. His muscles are sore, his head is now screaming, and the estimation of another ten hours of flight turns into less than ten seconds.  
He’ll plummet into the sea, but even the water seems more comfortable as a bed than the air he’s suspended in.   
Harry’s about to nod off, his eyes seem to slowly droop before finally snapping shut.  
He plummets.  
.  
For the first time in what seems like ages, Gabriel opens his eyes again.  
He falling, wind caressing physical wings that haven’t been manifested in centuries. He smells sea air and feels the headwind glide over familiar golden wings. He doesn’t really know where his other two pairs of wings went, but he manages a steep turn to avoid crashing head-first into the ocean waves. After leveling to a gentle glide over wave crests, he begins to think. And panics.  
Gabriel doesn’t know what’s going on.   
He should be dead. The stab from Lucifer (his family, his brother) clearly impaled his mortal form’s heart, and he can still remember the sudden burning sensation in his lungs.   
Father must have done this  
He can’t help but think that it’s a ridiculous thought. His father was dead. A small portion of his mentality can’t help but be bitter over the miracle that happened.   
If his father was still alive, where was he when Lucifer rebelled? When the situation in heaven turned into a dictatorship? Where was when Gabriel needed him the most?  
The placid pace of his flapping quickens with rage, and he tries to teleport himself into an area that he can shout his rage into without killing the ecosystem around him. He snaps his fingers on instinct-and gapes dumbly. His powers. weren’t . working. His powers were not working.  
He snaps again.  
And again.  
And again.  
With a muted shriek of frustration, Gabriel flips the bird up into the sky. He tries teleportation, summoning fire, and creating candy, but none of his attempts succeed.  
Great. He’s in the middle of no-where (he can actually pinpoint his exact location, but for the sake of his rant, he ignored the fact) with no candy, no way to quickly get out of the area, and the soundtrack of a small child’s snores running throughout his brain.  
Not to mention his looks. Shrunken from a man with a fabulous hairstyle to a midget with a rat's-nest and a ratty scar on his head. Fabulous. He tries to snap again to change his hairstyle and manages to do so without burning half of his hair off. Instead of giving him his signature hairstyle, he manages to change his hair into a blonde bowl-cut.   
With one more furious look at the sky, Gabriel starts to furiously beat his wings.  
The Winchesters are going to have a lot to answer for.  
.  
.  
At the first signs of accidental magic exhibited, Albus didn’t panic. Sure there had been reports of Harry wearing cast-offs of his cousin and exhibiting two large bumps on his back, but who knew about the fashion trends of youngsters? He himself distinctly remembered a time where pointy toed shoes were of the norm for every student of spanish ethnicity in the day, and his own experience with outlandish “wand ornaments” that caught on fire from the magical discharge from spell-casting.   
No, it wasn’t until Harry managed to destroy half of his relatives’ house that Albus began panicking.  
The boy was missing.  
Reports from miss. Figg were of the boy glowing and flying away on golden wings. That could never happen, it must have been all the fumes from the kneazle and cat waste coagulating within her house mixed with old age (disregarding his own in the process).  
The protections charms from Lily’s sacrifice were shattered with the absence of Petunia’s soul, and it would take ages to craft a ward powerful enough to hide Harry from former death eaters and political enemies.   
He would have to take the boy to Hogwarts.  
But first to prepare the staff  
He can’t help but slip a lemon drop laced with calming draught into his mouth as he predicts the reactions of different professors.  
.  
.   
There’s a deep burn of disappointment sitting in his chest. It’s a heavy thing, one that presses down queasily on his stomach and chokes his airways to narrow paths till he can hardly breathe. He’s nearly hyperventilating with the news after slamming the grates of his floo closed and locking his front door and the wards on his property.  
It’s only then when he allows himself to have a break in his composure.  
Snape had failed her.  
Lily’s son was dead.  
It would have been so easy, so so easy to kill the boy and his relatives. Even if the wards that Lily had set with her death stopped people with certain marks, it didn’t stop the imperiused. There were so many curses that would have explained the massive explosion in the house, but it wasn’t the cause. It didn’t match-up with why Petunia was left without a soul while Vernon and their pig-spawn was left alive. He knows that the muggles have explained the explosion as a pressure build-up in the bathroom of the Dursleys, but Snape knows better.  
There are somethings in the wizarding world that just aren’t talked about. The reason why first-years aren’t allowed down Knockturn alley, and why there are so many soul-less husks in hospices across their world.  
His mother, when she was alive, used to tell him stories of her year. Of how Grindelwald really came to power, and why he was known as “Black-eyes” to some. There were stories of a spirit that could take or give your life away, a rumor about the occasional wizarding child going awry and never being seen again, and “eyewitness accounts” of a grotesque figure in the mirror. He never believed them, as he thought they were stories made to scare him into behaving-  
Until he joined Voldemort’s coalition.  
The red eyed monster had several figures with him, always with pure black pupils and a disregard for blood on their person after a successful muggle-hunt.   
Snape cringed at remembering the time when one of those creatures reached to his face and tapped at his temple. There had been the distinct feeling of cloudiness in his thoughts before a period of unconsciousness. Parts of the prophecy that he had never planned to expose to Voldemort were seemingly sucked into the thing’s brain.  
There was a brief period in between Lily’s death and the interaction with the creature when he had been tortured more roughly, and while recovering, he became curious.  
While consuming potions to help with nerve-healing and muscle repairing brews, he browsed through thick tomes on folklore on foreign life-forms. With some success, he had found notes on multiple different types of minor spirits, but was fully captivated on the lore concerning demons.  
“Creatures quick as smoke and with hearts as black as night,” his mother used to say “Malicious and cunning, they may look like humans, but never trust their words.”  
He cradles a bottle of firewhiskey in his pale, gaunt, hands, and relishes the slow burning sensation down his throat.  
There was no hope for Harry Potter now.  
In his dizzying thoughts, Snape raises a bottle of essence of hemlock to the lamp light.

.  
.  
In a non specified wavelength of time and space, Death awaits in his realm. Multiple reapers scurry around, directing souls into the reincarnation cycle while dragging others to the grave. His current vessel as seen to humans is a dour looking older man, suit and tie combining with a long face to complete the look. If other beings were to look upon his form, he would look like an absence of energy in the air. He’s been described as “the smell of a cold body”, by a particularly bold fox-spirit while collecting it’s soul, but his most favorable form would be a thin teenage body with messy dark hair and glowing eyes.  
Shifting his head, he senses a small shiver in the workings of reality. There’s a disturbance in the force. Not that Death means to play the cliche from the new Star Wars series popular with many of the new souls of the age, but there honestly is a ripple within the fates.  
What are you up to now god?  
Souls he has been fated to collect are shifted, and the ripples caused are astounding.  
A familiar energy seems to radiate from a point, and Death takes a moment to ponder why, in particular, the particular body is used for housing the archangel. In other realities, he’s seen the spirit of the vessel become his master. Familiar hair and green eyes greet him, and he smiles.  
This should prove to be interesting.  
.  
.  
His face is against something sandy, and he can feel the intense burn of the sun against his neck and souls of his feet. There’s an occasional lap of cool waves washing against his toes, and he can hear the sounds of different birds and smell warm air from further inland that brings hint of flowers and grass.   
It must be a dream.  
Harry slowly shifts from his position on the sand, skin itching intensely as he kneels.  
“Hey”  
He jumps, startled. Looking around, he sees nothing but sand, sea and cliffs.  
“Not over there, in here.”  
It’s something like a mental door-knock, but the amusement is palpable within his mind.  
“Who are you? You’re my new vessel, right?”.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note, this is the second chapter, not much to see here. Anyone that had left kudos helped me through a pretty hard period when I was nervous for my first competition. Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. There will be more interaction between Harry and Gabriel in the next chapter


	3. Flight of the crow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a terrible terrible feeling when hunger begins to grip the insides and blot out all rational thought. Gabriel is going to be even more of an arse later, but if the story is interesting, the fanfiction account that I run updates faster than the ao3 account. Kudos are very appreciated.  
>  Warm regards,  
> Seo81

He’s flying as quickly as he can with the minimal amount of grace he possesses. It’s strangely calming, allowing him to physically work out age-old doubts and angers. There’s nothing but blue sea and sky, and several life forms try as best they can to greet him as he speeds past the sea on swift wings. Several adult dolphins and valves splash playfully as he slows to a gentle glide next to the waves, flippers splashing water on golden wings as the dolphins seem to laugh. There are a number of blackpoll warblers that swoop down on weary wings to nip at his hair and rest on the wake of his flight, and he laughs in genuine delight at the schools of dorado flashing in colorful ars across the waves.  
This was the way that Dad meant for things to be, he thinks  
There’s the warm sun on his back, and Gabriel can’t help but be reminded of simpler times, when his father was still with the host, when Raphael looked on Samael and Michael's play-fighting with amused exasperation, and when he was endlessly spoiled by both all his elder brothers with their chances of creating a new animal to release into the world.  
And for the record, Gabriel notes with a smirk, He will never regret the fact that he created the platypus. Really, Michael arguing that his otter creation had more finesse than Lucifer’s duck and beaver, and their reactions after he combined all of them together was hilarious.   
What took the cake was his father’s expression after he revealed his construction and begged for him to finalise the creation.  
“N-You know what? Yeah, sure, Just-just put in Australia, with all the other “things”, ok?”  
He didn’t exactly word it that way, but the feeling of utter exasperation radiating from his being and the way he pointed at the dry, rocky continent spoke words.  
Gabriel was pretty sure that was the last second to last time before time his father spoke to him. The last was when he had asked Gabriel to tell the prophets of “ the birth of christ”, as his father had put it. The memory ends on a sour note when he remembers coming back to the host and finding Lucifer gone, Michael raging silently, and the rest of his siblings silently panicking over the sate of their missing father. He had left a home with lightly quarreling brothers, to a bloodbath with the energies of several of his dying siblings spilling across the sky.  
He had always been frugal with his other creation opportunities, so in his panic, he sent the dying energies into space with the form of stars.  
There were so many of them  
Kabniel and Ashriel were just barely alive as he reached them, and he nearly burned out their grace in the as he flooded their veins with his own grace in an effort to keep them alive. He can vaguely sense the remnants of their graces in the direction from which he came from, and recoils at the inconsistencies that he can recognize.  
Kabniel and Ashriel were supposed to be dead. Their graces scattered across the sky as their human vessels completely deteriorated with the incoming of demonic presence.  
His mouth twists, and he concentrates on flying before he can fall into the sea out of ignorance. With the state that his vessel is currently in, he can’t afford to take a dip into to the frothing waves near shore.  
His wing beat quicken as he can finally see land. And after hours of open sky and sea, it’s a welcome sight. Gabriel feels something brush against his mind, and he recoils, instantly.  
No matter how many times Gabriel transfers vessels, he will never get used to the feeling of disorientation as he’s abruptly shoved into the recesses of his host’s mind. He’s only able to watch in horror as his host’s body (not host, Harry, Gabriel thinks) begins a swift decline. With what little control he has over his host’s body, he flaps swiftly away from the jutting rocks of an ocean cliff and towards a sandy shore. Harry’s body is still falling at too high of a pace to ensure his safety, so as a last-ditch effort, Gabriel reinforces Harry’s body with grace to prepare for a harsh landing.  
.  
.  
It’s rather boring, waiting for his host to wake up. Although Gabriel finds tidbits of information that he deems useful with the new fact that his grace is malfunctioning, he can’t do anything but wait until Harry transitions from his sleeping state to an awakened state.   
He now knows how to cook bacon, mash, and bangers; how to feed a family of several pigs and a horse during the holidays, and the newest moronic cartoon theme songs on the British television.  
He’s pretty sure that Harry can’t live on fatty, protein rich foods alone. (Gabriel pointedly ignores the fact that he had basically survived on some form of sugar and carbs since the time when sugary starch had first been extracted from plant matter), and he doesn’t have a choice in terms of nutrients with regard to Harry’s continued health.   
Gabriel’s panicking now. What is he supposed to feed a prepubescent boy? He hadn’t actually seen a vegetable ever since one of his siblings had created the precursor of one ages earlier.   
While he’s panicking, he notices Harry’s presence rousing from stillness. It’s a mixture of apprehension and nerves, and Gabriel has to mentally twist his hands in greeting his new host.  
Green eyes hazily blink open, and Gabriel gets a phantom sensation of a painfully dry throat. With a dry swallow, he blurts out the first word he has in mind.  
“Hey”  
.  
.  
Harry really isn’t sure he’s actually awoken yet. From breaking out of his relative’s house via flight and flying over the Atlantic ocean, he can’t seem to process the fact that yes, he now has a separate entity living in his mind. One that also happens to be very, very annoying.   
Their meeting begins with Gabriel jokingly saying that he’s a supernatural parasite slowly destroying Harry’s mind and doing the same to multiple other beings to begin the zombie apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, Harry freaks out. It takes more than fifteen minutes of calming Harry down before another distasteful joke from Gabriel sets Harry off again.  
By the time the sun first begins to lower in the sky, all that the duo had accomplished was to walk towards the treeline and establish that Gabriel was an angel, and that they were somewhere on the coastal shore of New Jersey.  
A god-be-damned. Freaking. Angel.  
Harry doesn’t care if Gabriel dislikes how he words his thoughts. The arse won’t stop nitpicking at the fact that he named all the spiders in his old cupboard after classmates that he thought were cool.  
“Aw Harry, come one, I thought we were friends~.”  
Harry ignores him in favor of swiping a piece of spiderweb away from his face.  
“Harry~”  
It’s getting darker, and if he squints, he can just imagine that Gabriel is a figment of his imagination in dark twilight hours instead of living inside his head. He receives a mental cuff to the head, and has to fight to keep a grin off of his face. It’s almost like having an annoying younger brother-.  
Gabriel freezes still at his words, and Harry can feel a headache building inside of his head. It’s a slow, steady thrum of pain that starts increasing in frequency until Harry crumples to the ground and moans. He doesn’t know how long the pain continues because it seems like hours before he’s able to get a sound out of his silent screaming. There’s an almost panicked feeling from Gabriel, and the ache abruptly stops. Mental walls seem to drive down between the angel and himself until all he can feel of Gabriel’s presence is a faint murmur of angry power.  
Harry picks himself off the ground cautiously, dusting his pants off when the mental wall loosens crack, and Gabriel’s snarl emits forth.  
“Don’t call me that.”  
The mental walls crash down again, leaving him with a slight headache.   
The night is suddenly a much more sullen and frightening prospect with it’s biting cold, long shadows, and rustles from underfoot. With a tired sigh, Harry rustles his (no, not his, Gabriel’s) wings, and wraps them around himself in a mockery of warmth and companionship.  
It’s lonely, he thinks to himself, almost intending for the thought to reach Gabriel. There’s something of a snort from the other side of the mental wall before Gabriel’s petulant voice breaks out.   
“Deal with it.”  
It’s the rest of what he hears from Gabriel for weeks.


	4. Coocoo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Um... Living in NJ? I wrote the chapter really early last year and I'm just posting it for the sake of posting it. Enjoy?

Harry is starving. He’s faces hunger before, but never at such a length.  
It’s been half a week since he’s arrived in New Jersey, and he’s wandered into a no-name area named Plainsboro. There’s a multitude of farm-land, rivers and posh public-schools that boast multiple awards for academics. There are also a cloud of students drifting out onto the school grounds for recess.   
It’s almost a hazy cloud of hunger that hits him as he smells packaged boxes of rice, stir-fry chicken, and fish sauteed in soy sauce. The Dursleys had at most shut him into his cupboard for two days at a time with small amounts of bread shoved in between periods of darkness. It’s a terrible, terrible feeling to be in what little shade the tree that he’s hiding in can give him while nearly gasping in pain at the feeling that his stomach gives. The deep feeling of shy, shameful envy he feels while watching the middle schoolers chat amiably or playing frisbee seems to form a cloud of gloom around his person.  
It’s miserable, he thinks as his stomach growls again.  
There are a few children coming from out of the shade to near his grassy patch of shade, and he can see the heavy textbooks held near oily school cafeteria food. He’s watching enviously before startling as one of the student’s eyes meet his own. He’s poised to take flight, standing, muscles tensing and wings slightly spread before stopping as a single girl creeps towards him.  
He’s suddenly held paralyzed in fear, stomach curdling and sweat laden fingers twisting the coarse cloth of his shirt.   
“Hi”  
The single world from the girl is enough to startle him out of his panicked thoughts, and he makes an unintelligible sound in response.   
The girl is young, chubby-cheeked, and chinese; a bright pink plastic flower tucked behind her long, dark hair. She’s bending slightly downwards to look him in the eye, brown eyes wide in curiosity, and the faint smell of something sweet coming from her hands.  
“I’m Lily.”  
The girl is gently smiling, a full mouth of braces doing nothing to distract from the paint splattered purple sweater bunched around her shoulders.  
Harry isn’t used to the another human being paying attention to him. He’s heard Petunia coo over Dudley, but to have such a sort of stranger show affection to him? It’s terrifying. His senses finally seem to catch up, and he begins to bolt away from the girl, running away from the shaded area he was staying at. There’s the faint exclamation of surprise from the girl, and he faintly sees her puzzled look as he glances backwards.  
With a single flap, he launches into the cloudy sky directly above the grassy field of the school. There are pained shouts behind him, and he looks back to see the girl lying on the ground, panicked shouts of the girl’s friends causing a faint feeling of guilt in his mind. He turns back towards the sky and continues to gain altitude through steady wing beats. His stomach mumbles again, but he ignores the feeling in favor fleeing away from the strange, altogether foreign feelings invoked by what happened  
.  
.  
By the fifth night in New Jersey, Harry is desperate. Wings hanging bedraggled after continuous flight, and eyes sunken with hunger. He’s constantly shivering now, the ever present feeling of cold fingers lancing across his body as his stomach no longer protests.  
He’s considered begging, but the thought of approaching loud, concerned people who might send him back to Britain (back with the Dursleys) is enough to discourage his feeble attempts at socializing.   
At this point, he’s hungry enough to scavenge from the trash bins behind the stores and homes he sees.  
Harry knows that Vernon Dursley had always threatened to drive him to London and throw him on the streets, but considering the amalgamation of smells coming from behind a store that he wandered behind, he doesn’t think it would have been that bad.   
It’s an asian food store, one that he knows from the continued muttering of his uncle about the “Yellow skinned, squid-eating, pointed-eyed freaks”. Harry’s seen a couple stores selling raw fish and raw pig ovaries across from the grocery stores that his aunt frequented, but never a market large enough to hold all of private drive. It’s a haze of red silk, pottery, and hawking vendors displaying bags of rice and fried foods sizzling on grills.   
He’s been yelled at multiple times to “get out of the way” as whole roasted pigs and ducks hang on hooks towed by broad shoulders cooks thunder past. He’s bumped into curious toddlers tugging at his wing-tips and a few young adults who do a double-take as he walks past. He’s eaten delicate peach jellies, stuffed meat-buns, and fried pancakes with bean-paste at the stands that give out free-samples, and multiple tidbits of dried fruit snatched from vendors unaware.  
It’s loud, it’s dizzying, it’s madness; but Harry loves it because of the fact that he can become one of the crowds slowly drifting across the floor without notice.   
He’s still somewhat hungry, but he’s unwilling to go back into the shopping market to get more samples in case the vendors begin to recognize his face. He wanders into the back of the store, intent on snatching a few more bites of roasted meat, but pauses in favor of watching a cook with a pinched face cart trays of food through the back door. It’s simple logic and a sort of desperate hope that drives him to creep along after the man.   
The back of the market seems drained of life in comparison to the warm red haze of the front of the store. There are strewn fish heads around garbage bins, large cuts of bloody bones thrown about, but more importantly; trays and trays of uneaten food.  
He hits gold with the first stack he digs in.  
It’s filled with the remains of a lunchbox-Stir fried greens, rice balls with fish wrapped in seaweed, breaded fried pork, and potato salad lie on the napkin, slowly soaking the paper with oil. Harry throws caution into the wind as he digs in.  
He’s never had anything so delicious in his life. With sweet and savory flavors, it’s a wonderful reprieve from coppery sink water and whatever wild plants he can recognize from his aunt’s garden.   
He finds several more boxed lunches inside the garbage bag, and eats until his stomach hurts from the amount of food inside.  
Thank you  
Thank you  
Thank you  
Harry doesn’t know who he’s thanking, but the sheer relief from not dying from starvation is enough to bring tears.  
Thank you  
.  
.  
After watching his host battle with hunger and thirst for the past few days, Gabriel can admit that he’d overreacted.   
So sue him, he had family issues. Even the half-deaf “prophet” that Gabriel had delivered his message to knew-despite the fact that the crotchety old man had “heard” him say that eating shellfish was a sin.  
It’s a bit pitiful, watching his waif of a host shove the leftovers of another’s meal down his throat. Harry’s tiny hands trembling as he scooped the last bite of rice away incurred a vague feeling of sympathy in him, but not enough to make him disband the mental shield between himself and Harry.  
Every time Harry fell asleep or fell unconscious from exhaustion, Gabriel was thrust into the forefront of Harry’s mind. So what if he knows that Harry is walking towards a certain destination? If he flew back a few miles from his host’s destination every time Harry fell unconscious, it meant nothing to him. If Harry died, he’d just to find another host.  
The cloud of vague feelings of regret and desperation within Harry’s mind are ignored.  
He’s bitter, and no one can call him out on it.  
Except for himself  
.  
.  
Holden Marksfield considers himself a decent hunter.  
He’s had werewolves shot-gunned within a foot of his person, vampires snarling at his face while dying from drinking blood of the dead, and multiple other creatures that went bump in the night crushed under heel.   
Today, he’s hunting thunderbird.  
There are hazy gray clouds crossing the skies and nothing but swamp and soy fields across the country roads he’s speeding across. It’s a balmy day, the sun peeking out of pockets of cloudless sky and humidity threatening to choke the docile citizens stewing around the asian market place.   
It’s a tiny community hidden in a niche.  
There are small, chinese children running around busy mother’s legs and begging for the chocolate character coins on candy-laden shelves, fragrant roasted duck and box lunches piled on metal shelves, and cold air drifting from ailes holding soy milk, plum drink, and aloe juice. Everywhere that he looks, he sees an influx of well fed children and plump adults.  
It almost makes him sick at the thought of such an area completely disappearing under a flood of fury, rain, and lightning..   
Holden is by no means a decent person. He’s done things that would horrify those around him, that would probably cause the people around him to cringe away in disgust. He’s not proud of his record, but the loss of his hometown due to a rampart ghost made him apathetic to most cases.  
But Holden can’t help but see himself in every sticky-cheeked child living in this tiny pocket of life in the middle of nowhere. He tries to convince himself that it’s just a job, but he’s not in the habit of lying to himself anymore.  
Finishing his meal with a last scoop of rice, he discards the empty box into the nearby trash-bin. There’s a faint shimmering green-gold emanating from the corner of his eye that makes him reach towards his gun, but as soon as he looks towards the area, the presence disappears. He’s tempted to further investigate the matter, but decides against it before he can entangle himself in the matters of the town.  
He can’t afford to get emotionally attached to this case.  
He had gotten the case off of a complaint about abnormally large bird sightings around a school, and that was what he was going to be investigating. He’d take it for the money.  
It seems like he hadn’t gotten over his habit of lying to himself after all


End file.
